Secrets
by Mizuki99
Summary: Secrets are dangerous when they come unraveled. Sawada Tsunayoshi is about to figure out how dangerous. Written for R27 month.
1. Prologue

**_Author's Note_**: I think I should make this short before I dissolve into unintelligible cursing because of how pissed off I am today. This is an old plot bunny I got when I was reading Hacker by 18Tsunayoshi69 only instead of a hacker, he's... something else. :p

**_Enjoy the read._**

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><p>Tsuna's fingers stretched over the soft, thin texture of the sheet, seeking out the heat of his beloved Cloud only to find the rough texture of the comforter's design.<p>

'_That's right…_' Tsuna thought wryly. '_Today's the beginning of the Fall Term. That means Takeshi and Tetsuya are already gone as well._' Oh well. At least he could ditch PE in peace (right up until Kyoya checked the attendance records at the end of the week—paranoid bastard.).

It had been almost four years ago to the day that the four of them rented a penthouse apartment smack-dab in the middle of the business district of Namimori as a sort of weekend getaway—those four being Hibari Kyoya, the resident disciplinarian, Kusakabe Tetsuya, his right hand, Yamamoto Takeshi, the male idol and baseball star of their middle school, and Sawada Tsunayoshi…

…resident Arcobaleno.

Oh yes, thirteen year old Tsunayoshi sneered as he looked in the mirror where he could see the reflection of the cold hard truth resting against his bare chest. Resident Arcobaleno.

He scoffed.

Almost four years ago to the day, he thought snidely. The same day, in fact, that they rented this apartment.

_"Take him in here!"_

_"Set him down gently."_

_"Tsunayoshi!"_

Tsuna recoiled violently, stumbling back until his back hit the wall and he slowly sunk to his knees. '_No. It's only a memory now._' He thought stubbornly as he used his breathing exercises to push the painful memories away. '_Nothing can hurt me as long as no one knows my secret._' He thought, pushing his sweaty bangs out of his face.

Nothing could hurt him as long as no one knew… and last time he checked, no one knew _anything_ about him.

Not even the Vongola.

Their information was contradictory and anything solid that they did possess was useless little facts like what kind of sprinkles he liked on top of his sugar cookies. None of it did the Vongola—or anyone for that matter—any good.

He was safe.

So why was it that he felt anything but?

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><p>"Finally made it to school?" A silken voice purred from the shadow of the gate. Tsuna's steps halted and his shoulders slumped. Slowly, he turned to meet his fate. "Rough night?" For once, Kyoya wasn't angry that he skipped over half of the school day. Instead, his eyes were calculating as he assessed Tsuna's condition.<p>

"I don't know… was it?" Tsuna asked in carefully clipped tones. This was a game he played with Kyoya almost every weekend. The closer it got to the anniversary of _that day_, the worse his restless nights became until all he could do was lay prone as memories assaulted his mind over and over, the phantom pain reminding him of his mistake and what it cost him what seemed like an eternity ago.

It didn't help that his Vongola Hyper Intuition was also acting up.

"Not outwardly."

Tsuna resisted the urge to flinch. He must have sought out Kyoya's strength while he slept. While it was unorthodox to rely so heavily on their Elements, there were times when Skies who _needed_ that strength made exceptions. Tsunayoshi was one of them.

Thankfully, he didn't have to form a bond with his Element in order to draw on their strength because of his standing as the Sky Arcobaleno (one of the few good things that came out of the deal) otherwise he'd have gone mad with the weight of this burden a long time ago.

'_And it's only going to get worse from here..._' A voice hissed from the back of his mind. Tsuna stiffened and scanned his surroundings, not really understanding the voice or why it spoke of an ominous warning that he couldn't quite grasp.

Funny… why did he feel so cold all of the sudden?

He was quickly jerked from his thoughts when Kyoya grabbed his hand and began to drag him down the hallways. Any protests that Tsunayoshi may have had quickly died on his lips when he caught sight of the look in Kyoya's eyes.

Something was wrong.

When they reached the reception room, Tsuna was surprised to see everyone from his inner circle gathered in the room.

While Tsuna may have known Takeshi, Tetsuya and Kyoya the longest, they were far from the only people in his group. His group included Kurokawa Hana, a sharp-wit and silver-tongued vixen who could loop-hole her way out of any contract, Miura Haru, a quick-minded teen hacker/engineer that went to one of the neighboring schools (which was currently under renovation so as a result, all of the students had to attend classes at Nami-chu) and Mochida Kensuke, the Kendo captain.

Oh, don't get him wrong. He was just as surprised by the last one as anyone would be if they knew of Mochida-sempai's reputation. He fought _all of the time_ and apparently had a few connections to the deep, dark underground world that was the Mafia.

Mochida-sempai was their information source. He kept his ear to the ground and let them know what was on Mafia FM. He gave them the cold hard facts of the Vongola's movement (and right now, the Vongola was their most pressing concern with three heirs dead and the fourth missing—that meant Tsuna's number was up and he did _not_ need that).

Which meant that this meeting could only mean one of two things. Either they'd found the Vongola's missing heir…

…or the Vongola was headed here.

To Namimori.

Tsuna's stomach dropped.

"_No…_"

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><p>The doors opened to the shady back-alley bar. "Reborn… called out by the old man again?" One of the informants drawled lazily. "The popular ones have it tough. I heard about that scheme in Barcelona. Where is it this time? Venice? Rome?"<p>

His lips curled into a smirk that was entirely too much like a snarl. "Japan."

"Japan?! D-does that mean the old man finally decided on an heir?" The blonde asked, spinning around so fast his spine almost cracked in half.

"This one looks like it'll be long." Reborn mused aloud.

"I hear that Japan has some of our most famous assassins retiring there. Tread carefully." The blonde said, recovering his composure and sipping on his tequila. "Primo's bloodline, eh? Good luck drawing it out. I hear he's a civilian."

"He won't be once I'm done with him…" Reborn's fedora dropped over his eyes causing them to gleam maliciously.

"When do you leave?"

If it was at all possible, Reborn's eyes grew more sinister. "Tonight."

The man on the corner smiled wryly. "As I said. Good luck." He pulled his brown beret down. "You're going to need it."

**_Tsuzukeru._**

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><p>And that concludes the prologue.<p>

**_Thanks for reading~!_**


	2. Chapter 1

**_Author's Note_**: Okay, so I'm a little out of practice when it comes to writing the physical responses there are to fear (even though I've experienced enough of it myself -_-;) but I hope to remedy that. I'm going to experiment a little so be sure to tell me what you think!

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><p>Tsuna swallowed around the lump in his throat to clear his mind a bit before they got down to business. He didn't have the luxury of losing himself because there was a proverbial elephant in the room that refused to be ignored.<p>

Reborn was on his way here.

Reborn, the _Number-freaking-One Hitman_, was on his way to _Namimori_ to train Tsunayoshi to be the next leader of the Vongola.

Well wasn't that just fucking peachy.

Tsuna forced his heart to stop trying to tear through his ribcage before he spoke. "How long to we have?" He asked with composure he didn't feel. How the hell were they supposed to get through this? Reborn was too damn good at what he did.

Tsuna had never had the chance to meet _any_ of the Arcobaleno but that did not mean that he didn't look into them. Oh, no, he'd read every dossier he could get his hands on, made digital copies and had them locked away behind an encrypted picture file on his phone. He knew all about _I'Prescelti Sette_ and their terrifying reputations. All of them were capable of killing him without batting an eye.

But that wasn't what he was afraid of.

Don't get him wrong. He _did_ have a healthy respect for _I'Prescelti Sette_ (he'd be stupid if he didn't and he most certainly was _not_ stupid) but just because they were the strongest didn't mean that they couldn't be stopped or killed. They were only human, after all.

Humans that were trained to kill.

Tsuna shuddered.

If Kyoya noticed his discomfort, he didn't comment on it. "His flight is in Hong Kong for a refueling stop. The closest airport is in Tokyo. He'll be here by sundown." Tsuna's relief was palpable as he mulled over that.

That meant he wouldn't officially start any training regimens until after an evaluation period. He could work with that. It would be a very close call, however.

The biggest problem would be hiding his Arcobaleno status. Thankfully, before he could throw himself into another near-panic, Mochida stepped forward with a small black box. "This will help you hide your little problem. It's a prototype that Verde came up with. Haru tweeked it a bit with the help of her nerds."

That was Mochida's term of endearment for Irie Shoichi and his elder sister. His elder sister was a forensic scientist for the Namimori Police Department. She spent her free time teaching Haru and Shoichi what she knew how to do.

In a way, she was also Mochida's number one informant as well because, while she may be a cop, she wasn't what you'd call an upstanding citizen.

Then again, Tsuna was in no place to talk... not when he was selling forged art and laundering the money he got off of that through the school (Kyoya had been pissed off at first until Tsuna said that half of the proceedings would be anonymously donated every couple of months—it was how they repaired a majority of the damage done to the school when one of them fucked up and brought enemies home with them). It was how they made the money they needed to get by.

Money talks, after all, and by now, he had a small fortune—which was better than before when the checks his father sent home were barely enough to scrape by. Between Tsuna's tuition and utilities, they barely had enough money to eat.

But those times were over. They had been for a long time and now, Tsuna found his life shifting yet again.

He sighed. He really should be used to the unpredictability of his life by now.

But, of course, he wasn't and probably never would be.

'_Just live one day at a time._' He thought. Those words had become his motto. They had helped him many times in the past and would undoubtedly continue to do so in the future.

"Thank you, sempai." Tsuna said, taking the little box.

As an Arcobaleno, Tsuna knew how hard it was to mask his presence. The fact that Verde found a way to temporarily seal away an object infused with the source of their power meant that Tsuna could hide for a little while longer.

Having his Flame cut off from him was like taking a jacket off in the middle of snow storm. If he went too long without it, he would die. Thankfully, Flame withdrawal had symptoms and stages which meant that it could be fixed if the need aroused.

Stage one was easy to cope with. Fatigue and headaches. Sometimes he'd feel nauseated but it always went away after a couple of days. There would be forty eight hours where nothing happened before stage two would come up and kick him in the ass.

Stage two was where things got tricky. He would display flu-like symptoms. Fever, aches, chills, coughing and wheezing and vomiting. It would mimic the flu in every way but cold medication would not touch it. It took a day and a half to manifest but lasted an entire week and even though there was one more stage to go, it was considered the final warning before death.

Stage three was the second-to-last stage before he went into a coma but it was also the hardest to predict because, unless the one experiencing it knew what he was looking for, they wouldn't be able to tell. It was a subtle, almost unnoticeable, shift in the equilibrium.

Tsuna hated that stage the most because he would _not_. Stop. _Tripping_.

There wasn't even anything there! It was _air_. He tripped on _air_, all because his balance was messed up.

Stage four was, by far, the most dangerous because no amount of outside help would make a difference to his condition.

Stage four was also considered what was called a _neutral state_ because once someone hit that stage, there was a chance that they would either die or recover.

The first time he'd cut off his Flame completely, he'd made the mistake of not allowing his core to refuel itself so he knew firsthand how bad the entire ordeal could be. It was not an experience he wanted to relive anytime soon and would have to make sure to put some distance between himself and Reborn when he went to refuel.

Tsuna channeled his Flame one last time to refill his reserves (which would buy him an extra week if Reborn didn't force him to go into Hyper Dying Will mode somehow) before he looked down at the box. "How does it work?"

"First of all, you'll need this." Mochida said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a little velvet sack. Tsuna caught it when he threw it and dumped the contents out in his hand. Cool metal rested against Tsuna's palm and he resisted the urge to gape. The little ring had an orange gem that thrummed with power against his palm. The gem was held in place by what looked like a small dragon's claw. "It's a custom ring. The gem has some sort of chemical compound that allows it to absorb Dying Will Flames. Verde said he considered all of the rings that already had an Element attuned to them defective."

'_He must be working on a way to combine all seven Elements into one ring._' Tsuna mused, his lips twitching. He was halfway there if the power thrumming under his fingertips as he felt the surface of the ring was anything to go by. '_He must have tried about two hundred different combinations to get this much._' There were small segments of Flame stored away—_Sky_ Flames, that is—but Tsuna wasn't sure he would be able to access it.

'_I guess there's only one way to find out._' He thought, lighting the Flame. As he suspected, the Flame didn't react.

His Flame, however, flared to life, leaving tiny sparks to fall only to disappear before they ever hit the floor. It wasn't as dramatic of a flare as it was when he went into Hyper mode—a state that removed any and all internal limitations on the body which, in turn, allowed Tsuna to do things that would otherwise be considered impossible—but it wasn't subtle either. Tsuna would have to take extra care not to let anyone see him light it, lest he have to silence them forever.

"Tsuna…" Takeshi began and then looked hesitant.

"I'll be fine, Takeshi. Reborn's not coming here to kill me." Tsuna said as he pushed the Flame into the little box. The lid opened and Tsuna took the pacifier off of the link that connected it to the chain around his neck—a gift from his father for his thirteenth birthday almost a year ago. He hadn't shown up (no that Tsuna expected him to) but it was certainly a pleasant surprise when it showed up in the mail.

Tsuna still read the letter that was sent with it when things seemed too bleak to continue.

"Besides," He tacked on, noticing how Takeshi's worry seemed to spread to the rest of the group. "I doubt he wants to start an internal war." Haru, Hana, Takeshi and Mochida blanched. Tsuna glanced back at them. "You know, I'm starting to think that you guys will never learn that _the Vongola protect their own_."

"Y-yeah but… are you really considered one of theirs?" Haru asked. "If anything, I thought that they would assume that you were more of a liability than someone to be protected."

"Three of Nono's sons are dead and one is missing. That's not exactly a good track record." Tsuna rolled his shoulders in some semblance of a shrug. "That being said, I'd also like to pitch in that it's highly likely that Reborn isn't going to mention their deaths, let alone the fact that he's being sent to train me as a last resort."

Kyoya snorted. "Those mongrels are fools if they think you are unworthy of them."

Tsuna's lips twitched. Kyoya was bad enough on a good day. He didn't need encouragement—especially when his words could get him killed. But that cynicism was the reason Tsuna kept him around. It reminded him that not everything was daisies and dandelions (that was Tsuna's biggest flaw—he was blinded by optimism).

"Why would Reborn keep that kind of information from you?" Takeshi asked.

"He's not sure how I'll react." Tsuna admitted. "I haven't given them enough to form a reliable profile." It helped that every time they sent out someone to check on Tsuna and Nana's wellbeing (since Iemitsu was either too lazy, too busy or both to do it himself), Tsuna made sure he was conveniently out of town. Reborn was going in all but blind.

That thought made him smile.

"You just _love_ being predictable, don't you?" Mochida drawled.

Tsuna ducked his head to hide a smile.

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><p>Reborn sat outside of the Sawada household with a small frown tugging at his lips. It was far too early for anyone to show any signs of waking up (by normal standards, at least—the sun was just starting to peak over the horizon, dying the sky a misty blue) but lo and behold, on the top floor, one of the rooms showed activity.<p>

Sawada Tsunayoshi was beginning his day.

'_Why would a teenager be waking up this early?_' Reborn thought, shifting the dial on the side of the infrared visor he was wearing to spy on his soon-to-be student. The teen had moved from his room to the kitchen where he looked to be setting something up (while infrared/heat-seeking sensors were reliable for tracking human movement, they were rather inept at detecting objects that didn't hold heat).

When the door opened, Reborn motioned Leon to the side and watched as the teen locked the house behind him, tapping the toe of his shoe against the pavement to make sure it was on all the way before he froze and turned around to scan his surroundings.

Reborn tensed. Could he sense his presence?

But when his eyes just slid over his hiding spot without doubling back, Reborn dismissed the idea. It was impossible.

Wasn't it?

**_Tsuzukeru._**

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><p><strong><em>Thanks for reading~!<em>**


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